


Distant Hands With Nothing Left To Hold

by the_rogue_bitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rogue_bitch/pseuds/the_rogue_bitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stanford-era Dean character study. Ends right before S1 Ep1.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distant Hands With Nothing Left To Hold

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the Jack Frost song "Cousin/Angel".
> 
> ***

At first, Dean thought it was _awesome_. 

He had everything all to himself for the first time since he was four. He could drive as long as he wanted without anyone shifting their freakishly huge body around in the passenger seat, sighing every hundred miles like it was their own personal cross to bear just being driven around. 

He could listen to whatever he wanted to without anyone bitching about his taste in music, or changing the station to public radio or some alterna-college-emo crap. 

He could have the shower first and spend as long as he wanted in it -- at least until the hot water ran out, anyway. And he could use all the towels and leave them just anywhere. 

Motel rooms were cheaper, too, since it was just him. He could pay for them out of his earnings hustling pool most times, since Dad had decreed if Dean wanted his own room, he would have to pay for it himself. That meant less time digging through garbage for credit card applications, less time spent filling them out and sending them in. 

He could even bring a girl back to his room any night he decided to work his charm on one. There was no one to roll their eyes, mutter “Horndog,” under their breath, and bitch about being exiled to the nearest all-night establishment until he was done. 

Yeah, having Sam off chasing his dream of a normal life was all kinds of wonderful. 

Dean and Dad could work as a team without any tension or bickering, no Sammy all the time asking “Why?” and questioning Dad’s motives or decisions. 

They got a lot done. Saved a lot of people, killed a lot of things. 

Of course, Dean had to pick up a lot of the slack that Sam left behind -- Dean had twice the research burden on jobs, twice the weapons cleaning, and twice the car maintenance. 

But it was okay, it was cool, Dean liked the way manual labor freed up his mind. He made some of his best inspirational leaps in cases while his hands were busy. 

Sam wasn’t entirely out of the picture, he emailed or texted on occasion, just to let him know that he was okay or when he changed addresses. Dean did the same. It wasn’t like they had ever been great communicators anyway, so Sammy doing the absolute minimum to keep 2/3 of the Winchester cavalry away from his Stanfordian sanctum wasn’t at all remarkable to Dean. 

Dean was pretty sure Sam never talked to Dad. But he never asked. 

Dean would never, ever admit to anyone that he was lonely. Not even if he was, like, tied up and tortured with a hot poker. 

But sometimes, in his inmost heart, he thought Sam being gone really, truly sucked. 

Like when Dean would turn to the passenger seat with a funny observation, only to have it stick in his throat, because the seat was empty. Or when he would lay awake in his motel bed, unable to fall asleep because the room felt too small, too unoccupied. When the sound of his blood in his ears still couldn’t disguise the fact that there wasn’t the sound of anyone else’s breathing to lull him to sleep. 

It sucked when Dean would go home with a chick and find out how coyote ugly she was the next morning. He’d never really valued his brother as a resource for cock-blocking, but maybe in hindsight, he should have. 

Hunting alone kept him off-balance for months. More than once Dean would have to be stitched up by Dad while he muttered under his breath about selfish brothers and fool’s errands. It got so that Dad worried if Dean was capable of taking on a hunt on his own, and that was the closest they came to any sort of Sam-style knock-down-drag-out in the history of ever. Dean finally bit out, “I’ll have to learn to do it by myself, won’t I?” and Dad reluctantly agreed. 

Having Sam off his back meant no Sam watching his back. And that was a huge adjustment. 

But he got through it, because it was what he was trained to do. And if he could just keep the loneliness and anger balled up and stuffed under his imaginary bed, Dean was fine.

Sam had made it pretty clear that Stanford was the Kingdom of Sammy and Dad and Dean weren’t welcome there, but Dean would sometimes swing through to check on his brother. He would stand in the shadows outside the dorm, and later, apartment building, where Sam was living, and watch. When he was satisfied that Sam was okay, he would leave. 

Sometimes Dean would stand there all night before he could tear himself away. He would turn the Impala toward the slowly pinkening horizon, and drive off. 

But as long as he could see that Sam was okay, even happy, Dean was fine. Fine with the loneliness, fine with the extra work, fine with not having anyone to bounce theories off, bicker with, steal his Twizzlers, leave girly shampoo in the bathroom, spar with, help with research…fine. He could hunt on his own, and do great. It was what he was trained to do. 

Until Dad went off on a hunt…and disappeared. 

Dean and Dad worked separately all the time. They split up a lot. There was a lot of evil to kill, and it was just more efficient that way. Dean was pretty proud of the fact that Dad finally let him hunt on his own. 

Still, they checked on each other often, like every three days or so. 

When Dad had called him and said he was going after something big, something that might take him a while, Dean wished him happy hunting, told him to be careful, and hung up. 

After ten days, Dean realized he should have asked for an estimate of how long “a while” was. Because not hearing from Dad made him tense. 

In Dean’s mind was a map of the United States, filled in by all the towns he had ever passed through in one way or another. Connected to him by invisible threads were all the people he’d met or saved, knew and loved. He could see his connection to Sam in his mind, heading off into a brick wall -- there, but inaccessible. More tenuous were threads that connected him to Uncle Bobby, Pastor Jim, Caleb.

Not knowing where Dad was made his connection to him trail off into space, and Dean felt like he was grasping at nothing. More nothing than usual, since he didn’t have Sam, and now he didn’t have Dad, and daily Dean fought off panic at how alone he was. 

He called Dad so often, he became scarily familiar with the number of rings before Dad’s voicemail picked up. He didn’t even bother with leaving a message anymore.

Dean hunted Dad, and that filled his days with grim purpose. He backtracked to where he knew Dad had been last and tried to go from there, but the man was too good. He left no traces anywhere. 

And of course there were other hunts that Dean couldn’t ignore. He couldn’t leave innocents in harm’s way just because he wanted to find Dad. He would tear through them, giving them just enough attention to bring them to a speedy conclusion, and then continue his search for Dad. 

It never occurred to him to call Sam. Sam’s last fight with Dad had been so awful, full of meanness and near-violence (Sam bellowing in that still-surprising, newly-deep voice, a man’s voice, “I don’t want to be like you!”), that Dean wasn’t at all sure that Sam would care that Dad had gone missing. Sam had taken himself so far out of the equation that Dean automatically discounted him as a resource. Dean was so used to _coping alone_ that calling Sam was the last thing on his mind. 

But after almost six weeks of getting nowhere, Dean was ready to admit the impossible. 

He wanted Sam.

He needed Sam. 

No one else understood the importance of hunting, and this hunt in particular. Despite the bad feeling between Sam and Dad, Sam would know that six weeks of being incommunicado was unlike Dad. It meant something really bad had happened. He would help, even if he had to tell himself he was helping Dean, not Dad. 

And Dean, he could do it alone, but it was killing him. He wasn’t sleeping, he was having nightmares when he _did_ sleep, nightmares of sand slipping through his fingers, of grasping at things that got torn away from him, of not being able to hold onto anything. It was so bad that he preferred being awake. His guns had never been so clean, his knives so sharp, his baby so well-maintained. 

He didn’t want to carry the responsibility anymore. He knew only one person that would understand, that he could share the burden with. He could do it alone, but he didn’t want to. 

Dean pulled the Impala up to the curb of a quiet street sometime after midnight. He got out and walked to an ornate ironwork door. Taking a deep breath and steadying his shaking hands, he picked the lock and stepped inside.


End file.
